Debbie Cassidy | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Debbie Cassidy talks with Adam Williams about generational family trauma that includes violence, tragedy and mental illness. There is great loss, grief and, in Debbie’s words, “a lot of bad decisions,” including drug addiction.
But there also is a story of divine epiphany and a triumph of the spirit to overcome those obstacles. It’s a remarkable hero’s journey.
Adam talks with Debbie about having grace, resilience and empathy, despite the traumas and pitfalls. They also talk about the role of Deepak Chopra in Debbie’s life, first through one of his books and later with the man himself. Among other things.
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Public Health & Environment: Office of Health Disparities.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio FM in Salida, Colo.
Debbie Cassidy
Website: debbiecassidy.com
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:15): Welcome to We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanist and well-being rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams. Today I’m talking with Debbie Cassidy and I’m going to tell you upfront, this is an extraordinary conversation. I want to bring you into it here like I usually do with these introductory comments, but I also am not wanting to sensationalize any of this.
So I will attempt to walk a fine line here and say that this life story is an incredible example of the hero’s journey. If you’re familiar with that concept from Joseph Campbell, there is generational family trauma that includes violence, tragedy, and mental illness. There is great loss, grief, and in Debbie’s words, “a lot of bad decisions.” We also talk about drug addiction in a way that somehow feels different than how I’ve talked about it here before with other podcast guests.
(00:01:12): There also is a story of divine epiphany, yet another recounting of a voice from somewhere that has guided one of Looking Upstream’s guests to a new life, a voice that saved their life. So yes, we do cover some heavy terrain here, but we also, as is true of the arc of any hero’s journey, overcome those obstacles.
We talk about grace and resilience and empathy. We talk about spirituality and the role of Deepak Chopra in Debbie’s life, first through one of his books and later with the man himself.
Debbie also is a tremendous example of the wounded healer archetype. She grew up in that generational trauma and has used that to serve others, first in her nursing career, and later as a spiritual guide and teacher. Like I said, it’s a hero’s journey with unthinkable twists and turns, and ultimately triumphs of the spirit.
The Looking Upstream podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority. As always, show notes with photos, links and a transcript of the conversation are published at Wearechaffeepod.com. Now, here we go with Debbie Cassidy.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:02:36): You’ve been camping lately, right? Even multiple trips?
Debbie Cassidy: Yes.
Adam Williams (00:02:39): Do you go with people? Is this time for solitude in nature? How do you go about that?
Debbie Cassidy: It’s both. Usually if I have friends that I’m going camping with. I just got back from a nine-day trip with friends from Steamboat Springs, but I go up a couple of days before they get there and I may stay a day or two after these people leave. That’s when I get my solitude time and the rest of the time it’s friends doing hiking, golf, whatever we decide to do during that.
Adam Williams (00:03:12): You take golf clubs when you go camping?
Debbie Cassidy: I do.
Adam Williams (00:03:14): Oh, wow, okay.
Debbie Cassidy: To some places. I was just camped at Turquoise Lake.
Adam Williams: Yeah, near Leadville.
Debbie Cassidy (00:03:20): Near Leadville. And we went down twice while we were there and played that little nine-hole course there.
Adam Williams: Sure, yeah. It’s right by there, but it never would’ve occurred to me to put those two together. No, that’s great. So I know you grew up in Arkansas and I’m wondering if your love of nature, of the outdoors, camping, any of that was something that was birthed to during your childhood. Was that a family pastime or something you learned from them or when you might’ve got into this kind of enjoyment and again, solitude?
Debbie Cassidy (00:03:50): Yes. I was raised in a rural part of Arkansas in the northeast part of Arkansas. And on a farm ranch we had cattle, we had pigs, we had horses, chickens, the whole thing. And with my horses I was out all of the time on my horses, and some days I would leave note for mom and dad saying, “Gone. See you tomorrow.” And I would take my dog, I’d take a little food, a little bedroll and my horse and my dog and I would go out and spend the night in the woods, just gone.
Adam Williams (00:04:26): Was that on your farmland?
Debbie Cassidy: No, not always.
Adam Williams: Okay.
Debbie Cassidy: Not always.
Adam Williams: That’s incredible.
Debbie Cassidy: Yeah, not always. I learned to commune with animals, and the rustle of the leaves and the trees with the little breeze. It was beautiful. I was on my horse and I’d go out in the field and see cattle, calves being birthed, and from that I just had this intense love of nature, of animals. And I remember when, I think I was in the seventh grade, we came out here to Colorado for the first time on vacation, and we were going up to out of Estes Park, up to Rocky Mountain National Park.
We stopped at a pullout and I wandered into that little stream that’s there… well big stream, the Big Thompson River, and I remember standing in the middle of it looking up at these peaks and I felt instantly at home. It was like, this is where I’m supposed to be. And I knew that to my core. Took me a while to get here, but finally moved out here in 1980.
Adam Williams (00:05:31): I feel that way about the mountains myself. I’ve tried to find the language for it, I can’t. I haven’t been able to yet anyway. There’s just something about that pole that… yeah, I love that as well.
Debbie Cassidy (00:05:44): Absolutely. I have lived here since 1980 except for a couple of times I went to Oregon for a job and it was wonderful out there. Oregon is almost like a sister state to Colorado because of the mountains, and the nature, and the love. It has the ocean, of course, but those mountains there, the volcanic type mountains, I call them pop-ups, they don’t have the pull as these ranges of mountains. So it was like, I need to go home. I need to go back to Colorado. I always come here.
Adam Williams (00:06:19): You talk about mind-body-spirit connection these days, probably not just these days, I’m sure you have been for a long time. But I’m thinking of that in connection with what we’re saying here, nature and the pull toward mountains, the pull toward the water and just being outdoors. I’m wondering about that and we’re going to get into that a lot, I think, here. There are multiple facets of your life work that I think tie in. You were a registered nurse. You are a yoga practitioner, I think a teacher. You have studied or practiced with Deepak Chopra and the Ayurvedic methods, right?
Debbie Cassidy (00:06:59): Correct.
Adam Williams (00:07:00): You’re a spiritual coach. There’s more I think to you even than what I’m already saying and yet I’m already thinking, well, where do we begin? How do we dive into this story of who you are and how this came to be, where you are in your understanding of self and spirit connection with nature and so on. So let’s just start with that big question, I guess, of how did you get into these connections and that spirituality?
Debbie Cassidy (00:07:25): Wow, that is a big question and my life has been a journey, and I think it really started when I was super young, but I didn’t realize it then. When we’re young, we take things in, but we don’t realize how that affects us in later years, and it just follows us through the years. And as I have gone from one thing to another, and learned, and then studied with Deepak, and became a shaman working with energy, it all led back to those first younger years of being in nature, of having family issues that was not talked about, and the mind connection there too. I think it’s easy when you’re in nature, people talk about how hard it is to meditate, but when you first learn to get that quiet and that silence in nature, it becomes easier as you go along. So it’s been an incredible journey for me.
Adam Williams (00:08:34): I think the family issues thing probably for a lot of us who find ourselves in this sort of place of, I don’t know, searching within these practices, whether it’s yoga or other spiritual practices, it’s trying to explore ourselves and figure out where did we come from, what are these influences that have been on me, and what do I do with that? How do I go forward? Who am I really, is a question that comes to mind. There is deep history. When you refer to family issues, I know that there are significant pieces of your story that have an incredible impact on who you are. Can we talk about that?
Debbie Cassidy (00:09:15): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:09:17): Let’s start with from childhood, from your childhood family and that history and the influences on you there.
Debbie Cassidy (00:09:26): The influences from my family history are still hard for me to comprehend and describe, and I’ve spent years doing that. My earliest memory of something, was going with my mother to where she grew up and I didn’t know the story at that time, but she started talking about herself as a child. And she walked us through the house and into the room where her father, when she and her mother, excuse me, she and her mother were there working on some cross piece stitch or something, and her father walked in and grabbed her mother and right in front of her and slit her throat.
And that looking back on that memory, it was like a nightmare hearing my mother talk about a nightmare she had, but as we walked around the house and the memories came flooding back to her, it was like, “Wow, this is real,” and wondering how my mother survived that trauma, Although I was too young to know those words, it was somewhere in the back of my head. It made a huge impact on me. It has led me through this long and winding road to where I’m at now.
Adam Williams (00:10:55):Your mom was a teenager when that happened.
Debbie Cassidy (00:10:59): Correct? She was 15.
Adam Williams (00:11:02): Do you have any sense of what happened or why that happened?
Debbie Cassidy (00:11:10): No. Back then, this occurred in the late thirties, early forties. I don’t have the dates with me. Everything was swept under a rug. You didn’t talk about mental issues, you didn’t bring that up, you tried to hide it. And I think from what I can gather and from the research that I’ve done, I’m thinking it was obviously a mental issue. I think it was probably schizophrenia.
I have been in touch with the facility that he was admitted to. He spent 25 years in a mental institution after that occurrence. He didn’t go to jail, he wasn’t convicted. They sent him right to a mental institution. So in my mind it’s probably schizophrenia, because mom talked about that day that we were there. Her father was a member of the church, he was a choir director, he was a deacon of the church. He was a good man that did this horrific thing.
Adam Williams (00:12:12): And there was no known history of behaviors or other influences, let’s say alcohol. It just… This is when it erupted and in such a tragic way.
Debbie Cassidy (00:12:26): Apparently. However, I can say that we went to my mother’s mother’s grave several years ago. She wanted to go there before she got too old to visit her mother’s grave. And she started talking then and she said, “I can remember at one time she told us the family, the children, that if she died by natural means she wanted to be buried by her husband. If she did not, she wanted to be buried elsewhere.”
So I think there was something there from that statement from my mother, but that’s as much as she knew, was that statement. And of course as her, as a child and the other children, they didn’t connect the dots at that time. It’s hard to connect the dots when you don’t know what really goes on between two people.
Adam Williams (00:13:21): Sure. And at a time when a marriage… Marriage is typically off limits for other people to say anything about, right, to speculate, to ask questions, to know much.
Debbie Cassidy (00:13:33): Correct.
Adam Williams (00:13:34): Especially in previous generations.
Debbie Cassidy (00:13:37): Absolutely.
Adam Williams: Everything was tight-lipped. What happened to your mother? And she had siblings, didn’t she? What happened to all of the kids after this?
Debbie Cassidy (00:13:49): Three of her older siblings were already out of the house and when that happened, mother quit school. She never graduated from school because she had to go to work.
Adam Williams: At 15.
Debbie Cassidy (00:14:01): At 15. She went to work as a waitress at 15. And she went from one house to another house to another house, staying with her older siblings like three months, four months at a time. She’d go back and forth between those.
Adam Williams: Were they all in the same area?
Debbie Cassidy: They were.
Adam Williams: So I would imagine there was a social stigma of some kind from this.
Debbie Cassidy: Absolutely, which is why it was never talked about. I mean, we didn’t talk about it. The only time practically that I ever heard mother talk about this was when we took a tour of the house she grew up in. And then it was just swept under the rug. You don’t bring those things out in the open, especially back then.
Adam Williams (00:14:46): I can’t imagine the weight of that for your mother, for all of them, but to carry that emotional burden, and it sounds like have to do it individually. There were siblings involved. Even if at different ages and different, that still was your parents. You still have some sort of feeling and sense of, “Well, what happened in this marriage? What just happened in our family? It blew up our family. It changed the trajectory and our view of self and family and maybe the world, the way we view life, and nobody talks about it.”
Debbie Cassidy (00:15:21): And nobody talks about it. There was no real mental help back then for survivors of the family. She had a younger sibling who was, gosh, 11 years younger than her. So he was very young and he went to one of the older siblings and became their child. He grew up as their son.
Adam Williams (00:15:52): I wonder if that’s what… Was that the story he was told? Did he ever know otherwise?
Debbie Cassidy: He did eventually, but not at the beginning.
Adam Williams: Yeah.
Debbie Cassidy (00:15:58): Was so young that he didn’t really remember his parents that well, and so he just grew up.
Adam Williams: That’s an interesting thing is that when you are that young and you didn’t necessarily witness the issues, but just to hear this is the story that’s in your lineage, this is what happened, I imagine has an impact.
Debbie Cassidy (00:16:18): Absolutely. It’s had a huge impact to myself, to them, to my sister, of course my mother. My father was my prince, and I just bless him for how he supported mother, because it was not that long before she met my father, still with that trauma there.
Adam Williams: As a teenager?
Debbie Cassidy: As a teenager.
Adam Williams (00:16:46): And then maybe got married, then?
Debbie Cassidy (00:16:48): They didn’t get married right then. He ended up going to World War II, but as soon as he got back, they did get married.
Adam Williams (00:16:54): Do you know if that’s something that she shared with him? Did she say, “Look, this is what’s on my mind. This is the family history.” Or is it so tight-lipped that you just walk into a relationship with all this sort of heavy baggage and nobody ever knows why you act the way you do because they don’t know what the roots of it are?
Debbie Cassidy (00:17:12): From my understanding, she did not tell him right away, but because of where they grew up, it was very rural. So it was kind of known. And he apparently asked her about her dad, not in the context of, “oh, I heard your dad killed your mom,” but in, “What about your family? Where’s your dad?” And she opened up to him at that time then, and he was the biggest protector of her from then on.
Adam Williams: You did not meet your grandmother then, and I assume you never met your grandfather?
Debbie Cassidy (00:17:48): I did.
Adam Williams: You got to go to the institution and meet him?
Debbie Cassidy (00:17:51): I did. Out of all of the siblings, my mother had five other siblings, she was the only one in that 25 years that ever went to visit him. We would go down there, I believe it was on his birthday every year until the kids, my sister and I, got a little bit older and then it kind of stopped a little bit, but we would go down there and visit with him for a little while. She said, “He was my dad. Yes, he did a horrific thing, but he was ill and he was my dad.”
Adam Williams (00:18:23): He did it in front of her.
Debbie Cassidy (00:18:24): He did it in front of her.
Adam Williams (00:18:25): So I’m wondering about the measure of grace and what you might’ve learned in that from her. She’s the only one who went and visited him and she’s the only one who witnessed it.
Debbie Cassidy (00:18:35): Correct. I didn’t understand my mother for years and years because our relationship was fraught with growing up not being good enough, and I didn’t understand why she was so hard on me and my sister. And it took me years to realize that she wanted a different life and she was terrified of passing on the mental gene, the crazy gene. She told me many times that she didn’t want me. I was a mistake. I shouldn’t be here.
And that was hard as a child to live with, knowing that you weren’t wanted and that you’re not good enough. Even if I made straight A’s in school, it was like, well, “Why aren’t they A pluses,” never good enough? So that was a hard cross to bear, if you will, growing up, and I didn’t understand, And I didn’t understand, my whole life has been this journey toward understanding this, and it’s only been within the last few years that I have come to understand my mother more and talk about grace.
(00:19:44): Yes, she was full of grace to have seen it, to have lived through it, forgiven my grandfather, saw him. He was released from the mental institution after 25 years. She helped him get set up in a house. She would make things for him like a pot roast or pie or whatever. We would take it over to him. My father would not allow her to go alone, however, because he was protective.
Adam Williams (00:20:12): He was released.
Debbie Cassidy (00:20:13): He was.
Adam Williams (00:20:14): I assumed when you said he was there for 25 years, it’s because he died there?
Debbie Cassidy (00:20:18): No, he was released.
Adam Williams (00:20:19): How old was he then?
Debbie Cassidy (00:20:24): I think he was in his late 60s at that time. I don’t have that exact number with me, but it was his late 60s.
Adam Williams (00:20:31): Was he able to work? What was his life or for how long after that, and was he okay after that?
Debbie Cassidy (00:20:39): He appeared to be okay after that. He had in fact met another woman in the mental institution. They got discharged together. They got married. They made a life for themselves for about 10 years before he passed away. So he was in his later 70s. So he lived this perfectly seemingly normal life after he was discharged after 25 years.
Adam Williams (00:21:04): There’s a lot of love and faith on the part of that woman too.
Debbie Cassidy (00:21:07): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (00:21:08): I assume she knew a story behind why he was there.
Debbie Cassidy (00:21:12): I can’t answer that.
Adam Williams (00:21:15): So given the fact that he had 10 more years of living outside of that institution after the fact, still no sharing of, “I understand what I did. This is why or what I think happened. I want to make amends.” Just none of that sort of thing addressing either the event and why he spent 25 years in an institution or his own needs, his own Well-being and state of mind.
Debbie Cassidy (00:21:45): Not that I know of.
Adam Williams (00:21:46): It’s like it didn’t happen in a way.
Debbie Cassidy (00:21:48): It’s like it didn’t happen. It’s like brushing it under the rug again, hiding it away. He’s released, going to live as normal of a life as possible, and life just went on. None of the other siblings would see him afterwards. My mother was the only one that would go visit.
Adam Williams (00:22:08): So your mother sounds incredible in that story and how she treated you and raised you also is incredibly difficult. And you said it was only in the last few years that you have started to understand or come to terms in some way a little better with who she was then or is, or where she was coming from. I don’t know. What is it in the last few years that has… It sounds like maybe started bringing some peace of some kind, or at least acceptance, with the way this life together as mother and daughter has gone?
Debbie Cassidy (00:22:46): It has. Again, it’s been a long journey that started well back in when I was four or five years old. And I always knew that there was something else that I was searching for, answers that I was searching for, raised in a religious environment, but for me that didn’t provide the answers that I was searching for. And it just went on until I made some bad decisions over my life because I was never good enough and always trying to be good enough or rebelling against being good enough.
Adam Williams (00:23:29): You’re not alone. I used to dig holes for myself, put myself behind the eight-ball, whatever metaphor you want to use because the pressure of having to be good enough.
Debbie Cassidy (00:23:39): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:23:39): You know what? I’m just going to dig a hole and jump into that, and now my success is climbing my way back up out of it. And then everybody’s like, “Okay, you did a good job.” But at some point I got tired of feeling like I’m not actually a loser, but I keep making choices that are self-sabotaging.
Debbie Cassidy (00:24:00): 100%. 100%. Self-sabotage is one of the things I do best. We grow up doing that when we don’t know better. I had an experience one night on a golf course. It was 20 below zero. I was cross-country skiing. It was New Year’s Eve. And I remember sitting out there going, “What am I doing with my life? This is not the direction that my life was supposed to go in, or I want it to go in.”
And I just ask out loud into this beautiful, cold brisk night, “What am I doing?” And I remember this voice that I heard that I literally looked around me going, “Who? Who’s out here with me after midnight on this cross-country ski?” And it said, “So change it,” as clear as day. The answer to my question, “What am I doing?” “So change it.” So I took that to heart and it took me several years, but I started reading.
(00:25:08): I started really looking at things in a different way. I discovered Deepak Chopra, his first book, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. It changed my life. I was able to look at it. Wayne Dyer, all of the archetypes that we think about, who we really love and speak to us. There was Wayne Dyer, of course, Deepak, Marianne Williamson, Louise Hay. All of these writers along the way that really touched me and propelled me on that journey.
And that is what started me to believe that there was reasons behind all of the stuff that had been swept under the rug for so many years. And it took, oh gosh, it’s been 30 years of exploration, 35 years or more of exploration for me. And I remember so clearly my mother… Well, I got to work with Deepak and that changed my life in many, many different ways. And then I met another teacher who really brought me into the fold of looking at the baggage that we come into our life, that is formed, all of those limiting beliefs, the self-sabotage, you spoke about, all of those things.
(00:26:30): And I really started to heal that, peeling away those layers of the onion and really got down to, wow, this all stems from generational trauma, childhood wounding, all those things, the epigenetics of the whole thing, what has come into my life. And that brought me to understanding my mother more. And I’ll never forget, I had an astrology reading by one teacher of mine, Tris Thorp. She’s a wonderful person. And it explained our north and south nodes. And I don’t know if you know anything about astrology or not.
Adam Williams (00:27:07): I don’t.
Debbie Cassidy (00:27:08): I don’t really either, but Tris kind of explained the north and south nodes, and she said, “The north node is kind of what you come into this life with, and you’re kind of familiar with it and you gravitate toward that.” For me, it was like healing, being in the medical community because that’s what I came into this life with prior. If you agree or believe that [inaudible 00:27:33].
Adam Williams (00:27:32): I’m open to a lot of possibilities because my bottom line is I don’t know.
Debbie Cassidy (00:27:37): Exactly. Right, exactly. Well, the south node is what we are really came into this lifetime to heal. And I found out that my south node is all about generational wounding, about family, about healing, and that just cracked my world wide open. And I’ll never forget the day that it dawned on me that my mother didn’t not want me. She was really afraid of passing that gene onto me because my sister did have mental illness.
She was older than me, and she saw that. She didn’t want somebody else coming into this world. My mother used to look at me throughout the years and she has this piercing eyes, and she would always say, “Debbie, are you okay?” And I would go, “Yeah, mom, I’m fine. No problem.” I didn’t realize until that day when I was healing through all of this trauma, what she was really asking me, “Was I mentally okay? Was I emotionally okay?”
(00:28:52): And by the time I realized that mom had broken her hip, she has dementia, she was in rehab. And I had one of the nurses grab her phone and FaceTime with me. It was her birthday. And I said, “Mom, do you remember when you used to ask me if I was okay?” And with the dementia, she wasn’t quite putting it together. It takes the mind longer to connect the dots when you have dementia.
And she still wasn’t getting it. And because there was this other person there, I didn’t want to say, “Hey, mom.” And I said, “Mom, I want you to know I’m okay. I’m not like your dad. And I’m not like Linda,” my sister. And it took her a minute or so, and all of a sudden her eyes got really big and she looked at me and she goes, “Do you mean you’re really okay?” And I said, “Yes, mom, I am.” And to me, that’s the greatest gift that I could ever give my mother. Sorry.
Adam Williams (00:30:05): No, no, no. This is the space for that. The impact that your grandparents had on your mother, and then she had on you as your mother saying, “I didn’t want to pass this on. Now I’m scared because I have another child.” And the burden that put on you, your sister, there’s a lot going on there too, that had a significant impact on you and your life from birth, right?
Debbie Cassidy (00:30:40): Yes. Yes.
Adam Williams (00:30:43): What is that?
Debbie Cassidy (00:30:47): My sister was… She was never diagnosed, but she definitely came in with some of the genes… Thank you… That our grandfather had. And when I was first brought home after being born, she immediately put a pillow over my head to try to smother me. She didn’t want me there. She wanted to be an only child. She tried to drown me at one time. And this of course, I don’t remember, but it was my mother told me about it. She tried to drown me one time. Mother caught her with me in a bathtub with my head held under water. And then one time when I was older, she locked me in the deep freeze, and I could have frozen.
Adam Williams (00:31:54): Are we talking about one of those that sits on the floor that maybe is in a garage or a basement or something like that?
Debbie Cassidy (00:31:56): Correct.
Adam Williams (00:31:56): She locked you in?
Debbie Cassidy (00:31:58):Correct. And my mother being my mother, she had, I swear, some really great psychic abilities that she always denied, but she was working at that time and she said, all of a sudden she felt a little nauseous and she went to her boss and said, “I have to go home.” And so she left and she drove home and we had a carport with a little room out here where the freezer was at, and she said, “Well, since I’m home early, I’m going to get something out of the freezer for dinner.” So she walked in there and she opened the deep freeze, and there I was shivering.
Adam Williams (00:32:33): Any idea how long you’d been in there?
Debbie Cassidy (00:32:35): I don’t, because you know, it’s pretty scary being locked in. It’s dark. There’s no light. You’re pushing, you can’t get out. And my sister said, “Oh, it was a hot day. She wanted to go in there.”
Adam Williams (00:32:48): You said it was later, your sister was several years older than you. How old was she? How old were you?
Debbie Cassidy (00:32:52): She was teenager and I was probably about seven, eight at that time.
Adam Williams (00:32:57): Definitely old enough.
Debbie Cassidy (00:32:58): To know better
Adam Williams (00:33:01): Because there’s a lot of times siblings, older siblings, when a new child comes in and they’re worried about the attention, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want this kid.” This took it to some different levels and continued. It persisted for many years.
Debbie Cassidy (00:33:14): It did. It did. She used to whip me. She would babysit for me, and she would whip me with dad’s belt. And then she was very kind in telling mom and dad, “Don’t worry about her bath tonight. I’ll take care of it,” because she didn’t want them to see that she had broken my skin from whipping me. So I was not an abused child physically by anyone except my sister.
Adam Williams (00:33:40): Wow. So your mother knew that this was a thing. How seriously do you feel like people were taking the issue, especially considering then your grandfather, that there might be a mental health matter going on with your sister? You were still at risk, it sounds like, throughout your childhood.
Debbie Cassidy (00:34:02): My mother quit work that day.
Adam Williams (00:34:04): That she found you in the freezer?
Debbie Cassidy (00:34:06): That’s correct. I think she knew at that time that she needed to be at home, which my father, I think had always said, “You don’t have to work.” But she was used to taking care of herself from 15, so she wanted to earn her own money and stuff. So she continued working, but she did stop work that day and stayed home, because by that time, my sister was older, stronger, and she felt like she needed to be there, I think. Now, did she ever for sure tell me that? No, but she did quit work that day. As far as knowing the history and seeing my sister, it was still wasn’t talked about much.
Adam Williams (00:34:48): Right.
Debbie Cassidy (00:34:48): It was still-
Adam Williams (00:34:50): Is this the ’50s?
Debbie Cassidy (00:34:51): No. Well, in the ’60s. In the ’60s.
Adam Williams (00:34:57): Sorry, my math put you at the wrong time there. Yeah, you’re not quite as old as that.
Debbie Cassidy (00:35:02): I’m not quite old.
Adam Williams (00:35:02): Yeah, sorry. So certainly, I imagine it was very difficult for your mother to decide how do we navigate this because you don’t talk about these things. If I say that one of my daughters is, “crazy,” right? If we have problems there, “Well, this is what happened with my father, but how do I protect my younger daughter?” I imagine she felt pretty unsure of what to do, which probably kept an awful lot of stress, fear in the house. And were you living a hyper-vigilant, fearful state, just totally distressed by your sister through your whole childhood?
Debbie Cassidy (00:35:43): I don’t remember that. I remember being a pretty happy-go-lucky child who was fortunate enough to be raised on a ranch and farm where I was out with, like we spoke of earlier, the horses and everything. So I was out of the house a lot. I never watched TV. I don’t know what some of the cartoons are that everybody talks about, because I was like, “Why would I watch TV when I can be outside on my horse?” Right.
Adam Williams (00:36:10): That would’ve been the Flintstones and The Jetsons back in the ’60s.
Debbie Cassidy (00:36:15): I never seen either one of them.
Adam Williams (00:36:16): I only have as the reruns in the decades since.
Debbie Cassidy (00:36:20): Oh, that’s so funny. I think on the flip side, my sister could be a really beautiful person. She could be super kind. She could be helpful. It was almost like bipolar where you flip a switch and one time they’re like here and this next second, they totally are different. So she was a beautiful person.
So I don’t think mom and dad, or anybody in the family that knew Linda, didn’t see that side of her, the flip switch side, they saw that beautiful, sweet, kind, compassionate person. And that’s when it makes being with people or living with people or knowing people hard because for me as a child, it was like, “Oh, my sister’s taking care of me. Oh no, she’s not. She’s beating me.” You just never knew.
Adam Williams (00:37:20): That feels harder to me than if there is a consistent behavioral pattern that you could have predicted. But you didn’t never know which sister you were going to have.
Debbie Cassidy (00:37:28): Correct. And Mom and Dad saw a lot. I think Mom knew, but Dad saw that sweet, kind, beautiful sister daughter.
Adam Williams (00:37:39): This might seem like a strange question to ask at this point, but then as the two of you aged, you grew up, you became adults, was there a different kind of relationship at all or how did things unfold with her between the two of you as you moved forward?
Debbie Cassidy (00:37:54): We were not close. We were not close. I was getting older by that time going, “Enough is enough,” learning how to set my boundaries a little bit. And so as I grew, she was several years, six years older than me, so she ended up getting married, having a child. She was out of the house. So those last years of being in school, those last six years were fairly normal for me because she wasn’t around.
After I got out of school, I did leave home and moved to Little Rock, which was several hours away from where we lived, and started my life. But every time that we were together, it was never a closeness. And I regret that in a way, but in a way that was self-protective mechanisms at work too, because I knew how to better protect myself. My niece, my sister’s daughter, is such a sweet person, but she didn’t understand why that we weren’t close. And she has a couple of issues of her own too, from growing up with her mother.
Adam Williams (00:39:16): And your sister continued to for the rest of her life?
Debbie Cassidy (00:39:20): Correct. My sister had several instances of being accused of theft or some other things. Like in high school, she was accused of stealing from other people’s lockers, just various little things that add up. She did end up in prison. She was accused of murder. She was convicted of murder, and she was prison for about 16, 17 years, and she got ill. She had multiple myeloma, and she ended up dying in prison.
Adam Williams (00:39:57): I think you tried to be helpful to her during that time.
Debbie Cassidy (00:40:01): I did.
Adam Williams (00:40:04): Did you go see her or was that throughout that whole period or was it when she became ill?
Debbie Cassidy (00:40:10): No, from the time that this all occurred, I was there a hundred percent. Really, I was there for mom and dad and my niece. I was doing this for them more than for my sister, but I was there for the entire trial. I was there after she went to prison. I took mom and dad every year, once or twice a year, to visit her in prison. I would fly to Arkansas, fly with them out to Virginia or drive them out there, depend upon this situation.
Adam Williams (00:40:48): Because she got moved at some point.
Debbie Cassidy (00:40:51): She was in Virginia at the time that the murder occurred.
Adam Williams (00:40:55): Oh, okay.
Debbie Cassidy (00:40:56): Yeah. By the way, she did deny it until the day that she died that she did this.
Adam Williams (00:41:00): Okay.
Debbie Cassidy (00:41:01): So I have to put that out there. And I don’t know, I can’t tell you with certainty yes or no.
Adam Williams (00:41:10): That’s not the piece I think that I’m most interested in other than you and feeling for your mother, that this is exactly what she did not want to happen. This is exactly what she did not want to pass along. And so I can only imagine how horrible she must have been feeling as this whole thing unfolded and probably wondering, “What role did I play in this simply by existing and passing along genetics?”
Debbie Cassidy (00:41:33): Correct. Correct.
Adam Williams (00:41:35): And for you as the one who she had tormented as a child, when you heard this news, when you sat in this trial that had to be so much more complicated for you that… Was this something like, “We were afraid of this,” or “We saw this was a possibility, we couldn’t stop it.”
Debbie Cassidy (00:41:56): I think we didn’t see that as a possibility that it would go that far.
Adam Williams (00:42:05): Okay, sure.
Debbie Cassidy (00:42:05): It was shocking. And to people in Arkansas law-abiding, my father was well known. Everybody respected him, and for this to occur was heartbreaking for them, and they didn’t know what to do with it. The day that the phone rang, they were being notified that this person that my sister had taken care of and befriended was an elderly lady. The phone rang and my mother said to my dad, “I can’t be in the room.” She went to her little office sewing room. She didn’t come out for two weeks. She knew something had happened at that time. And dad answered the phone and was like, “Wait a minute. I don’t understand. What are you telling me?” This whole thing. But I think my mother, with that psychic ability that she had, knew instantly that something had happened. I did not take a vacation for almost 16 years except to go to visit my sister in prison.
Adam Williams (00:43:14): Which I want to highlight as another example of grace. Your mother had it for her father under those tragic, horrific circumstances, and then you with this relationship throughout your childhood, but then also it wasn’t close. I mean, I have older brothers and I would not describe our frequency of contact as being close, and we don’t have this history of the negative history at all between us. So for you to overcome all of that and to extend that sort of love and grace, even if it wasn’t as much for her, but for her daughter, for your parents, to me, is so remarkable. It’s a big heart.
Debbie Cassidy (00:43:56): Thank you. I had not thought of this before. Thank you.
Adam Williams (00:44:10): Yeah. I’m just reflecting back what I hear, what I feel. I imagine all of these things naturally have had an impact on how you have then gone into your life as an adult and gone through it as an adult, and how you have maybe trusted or not, how you have allowed yourself to feel close or not with anybody, whether it’s a romantic relationship, it’s a work relationship, it’s a friend, it’s a, anybody. How you view people and their motives or their, “Well, any moment. I don’t know if I’m going to get the good cashier at the store or the one who’s going to snap at me for something because I need to be…” There’s so much put into this.
Debbie Cassidy (00:44:57): No, I haven’t been that way. I think I have been too trusting, if anything.
Adam Williams (00:45:05): Wow.
Debbie Cassidy (00:45:06): It’s interesting because some of the bad mistakes I made really stems from the not being good enough. So some of the toxic relationships that I’ve been in, it’s really been about, “Wow, they like me.” I think of Sally Field, remember when she won the Oscar and she goes, “They like me. They really like me.” I felt that way when anybody paid attention to me, they thought I was pretty or fun or whatever.
It was like, “oh, they like me. Sure, I’ll marry you,” because I was craving that, that I was enough, that I was liked. But to answer your question more specifically, somehow I came through it all. And when people tell me that they’re going to do something or whatever, I believe them. I don’t have a reason not to until they prove me wrong. So I have lived my life that way. So if anything, I’ve probably trusted too much.
Adam Williams (00:46:09): That’s incredible. I think because I think that I find it fairly easy to lose faith and trust in people, and I’ve not gone through near the depth of heartbreak and difficulty that you have in these ways with relationships. So again, it’s very remarkable. You did get married?
Debbie Cassidy (00:46:32): Oh yes.
Adam Williams (00:46:34): What do you mean by that?
Debbie Cassidy (00:46:35): A few times.
Adam Williams (00:46:36): Oh, okay. Okay. Well, I know that you had a husband who died.
Debbie Cassidy (00:46:44): I did.
Adam Williams (00:46:46): Was that at the end of that few times? Where in the line… Okay.
Debbie Cassidy (00:46:51): No, that was very early on. And Ron was, his name, was one of the people that I knew loved me for me. It wasn’t anything… And when you talk about… The term is probably overused, but when we talk about soulmates, soul relationships, soul partnerships, he was that for me. And he died very young, massive heart attack scan. We had moved to Colorado, my dream. We had gotten to Colorado and then I was on-call in surgery, and he went off to ski. And I got the phone call that he died, massive MI at 35, on the ski slope. So that sent me into another spiral for sure, because that was the love of my life, still is.
Adam Williams (00:47:47): That spiral. We are not through your big story yet, I know. You want to talk about the spiral at all and get more of this story out here, or is this just adding up to too much?
Debbie Cassidy (00:48:03): I’m okay to continue if you would like to.
Adam Williams (00:48:08): Well, I’m good with it, but what I promise is that where we are leading is an arc here that is going to lighten. We’re going to lighten up after we let other people know all of this that you’ve overcome and you’ve gone through, which, yeah. This spiral, after your husband died, you were a registered nurse.
Debbie Cassidy (00:48:29): Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams (00:48:31): Where do we begin with that?
Debbie Cassidy (00:48:33): Wow. Where do we begin with that? After Ron died, I spiraled and I met a person who was fun. He also happened to be a drug dealer, cocaine. This was in the ’80s and cocaine was a big thing back then. And I began using cocaine and it became a habit to the point where I did not work. I quit my job as a nurse because I could not put together what I was doing with being a healer in the medical community.
Adam Williams (00:49:14): You mean internally, like mentally, emotionally–
Debbie Cassidy (00:49:14): Mentally.
Adam Williams (00:49:17): … you felt the–
Debbie Cassidy (00:49:19): Correct. Correct.
Adam Williams (00:49:21): And then chose cocaine, use addiction–
Debbie Cassidy (00:49:26): Correct.
Adam Williams (00:49:27): … over being a nurse.
Debbie Cassidy (00:49:29): I did.
Adam Williams (00:49:32): To me, there’s a lot in that. I think about what that… How do you make that choice? And I don’t ask that with a judgment. I ask… I’m thinking of what’s going through your heart and mind as you’re making that kind of choice, because you know that you are making a positive difference in people’s lives as a nurse. You’re educated. You have what a lot of people would look at as a stable professional, career path, life path, but you must have been hurting to such a degree that you went ahead and chose the other turn.
Debbie Cassidy (00:50:08): I did. I think it’s with any substance that people chooses to use to dull the pain, mask the pain.
Adam Williams (00:50:18): Yeah.
Debbie Cassidy (00:50:18): My drug of choice at that time was cocaine. I’ve never been a big alcohol person, but boy did I like the cocaine. It was that high. It was instant. It was fun. It was just… took me away and I could forget about life for a while. So for two solid years and having a drug dealer, living with a drug dealer who at any point would have a pound of uncut cocaine in the house, was like a candy store. I spent two years doing up to 10 grams a day. And for people who don’t know what that looks like or what that means, that means I shouldn’t be alive at this point. I should not have survived 10 grams a day for two years.
Adam Williams (00:51:18): Can we put this in some sort of context that people might understand, even if they’ve only ever seen on movies? People take a razor, they chop up a line and they snort. How many lines are we saying might be in just one gram?
Debbie Cassidy (00:51:32): Well, it depends upon the size of your lines. They can be nice and tiny that you see a lot, or they can progress to the size of my little finger where you’re snorting that much at one time. So it’s a lot. Little grams come in the little bitty vials. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one, but when you line those up, it doesn’t look like that massive amount. But for what it does to you getting high and what it does to your body, it’s a tremendous amount.
Adam Williams (00:52:07): If we put it in context, maybe with chain-smoking, someone who smokes three or four packs of cigarettes a day where you’re just kind of almost non-stop. It might not be quite to that degree with this, but it seems like you’re tapping that little vial out for another line every so many minutes maybe.
Debbie Cassidy (00:52:24): Yes, you are. You get to the point where it’s every 15 minutes or so to the point where have it on a mirror and put it on the nightstand ready for you to do first thing in morning.
Adam Williams (00:52:39): Oh, wow. Yeah. Just to get out of bed. I think about the money that goes into something like that too. And of course you had this boyfriend who was a dealer, but was that the linchpin of the relationship? Was it, “Hey…” If I’m him, am I thinking, “Oh, I can keep you here if I just let you use the supply,” and then you’re dependent on him because he brings supply. Because otherwise you could be looking at what, several hundred dollars a day, a thousand dollars a day.
Debbie Cassidy (00:53:08): A thousand dollars a day.
Adam Williams (00:53:10): And I’ve always been curious about that. When it comes to such addictions, how do you afford such a thing? My drug was alcohol far and away. I was never offered cocaine. I think we can all be happy for that. I never got into weed much or pills or stuff too much. I would’ve been afraid of heroin or meth. I always said if I was a rock star, if I was like Mick Jagger or Keith Richards, that I would’ve been dead long ago, because I wouldn’t have said no. And my tolerance levels for all things, and the ego behind it would not have let me pull back. You survived it.
Debbie Cassidy (00:53:50): I survived it. I survived it. To this day, sometimes I don’t know how, other than having this very deep knowing within myself that it wasn’t who I really was. And I can remember my friends, the group that I was at, they after a period of time started free-basing cocaine, and they wanted me to do it.
Adam Williams (00:54:17): Which is using a pipe. Is it more like crack?
Debbie Cassidy (00:54:19): Yes. Yes, at that point, you’re melting it down and doing all of that. I knew I couldn’t do that because I knew if I did that… In my very soul, I knew if I did that I would be lost to it for sure. So I always refused to go there to do that. And the point came for me is what I referenced earlier is being out on the golf course on New Year’s Eve, when I heard the very source, [inaudible 00:54:50] change it. That’s when it culminated for me. That’s when my life started turning around.
Adam Williams (00:54:54): You were using coke up until that experience?
Debbie Cassidy (00:54:57): I was on coke during that experience. We were at a huge party in Vail, had condos there, and the whole group of us was supposed to go out onto the Vail golf course, cross-country skiing. And it was very cold that night, and at midnight we were all going to go out. Well, everybody was so high. They were all so using alcohol because that’s such an upper, so people drink alcohol to bring them down.
I didn’t really do that, I just kept the high. But that evening was different for me. I didn’t do as much as I normally do, and I was observing around me, and I could already feel that change. And when the other group said, “Oh, it’s too cold to go out there. We’re just going to stay here.” It was like, “I’m going out. I brought my skis. I’m going out,” and I went out onto the golf course alone, the best decision of my life.
Adam Williams (00:55:51): How do you come back, join the party or the remnants of it, or whatever it was like when you walked back through that door, knowing what you had just experienced and this epiphanous moment and decision? And how do you walk back into that environment that had to have felt so in contradiction to what your heart just told you, “Absolutely, I want to do better?”
Debbie Cassidy (00:56:16): It was surprisingly easy. I walked back in, went straight to the bedroom. And the next morning I told this person I was with, I said, “You need to take me home.” And he goes, “Wait, we’ve got another two days.” And I said, “No, we don’t. Take me home.” I went back and after New Year’s Day, I was looked for an apartment. I was moved out within three or four days. I never looked back. I never had coke again. It was never a factor. I never went through withdrawal or anything. I think when that voice came to me and said, “So change it,” that’s all I needed. I didn’t look back, which in itself is quite the miracle.
Adam Williams (00:57:02): Sure. As you pointed out, that level of use very easily could have led to you not being alive. You had made the choice to go that direction instead of continue as a nurse. Do you think on some level you were okay in your mind? You had resigned yourself to, “it’s okay if I don’t make it out of this.” Were you kind of wanting that?
Debbie Cassidy (00:57:25): I think in a way I was, because I think having survived what I had, although not having the full realization of the whole family thing at that time, but I think with Ron dying, I didn’t really care if I was there or not.
Adam Williams (00:57:43): If it were me, and I talked about me with substances a little bit, I have plenty I can dig into about shame and guilt and all the things. So if it was me in your seat for that, I think I would’ve felt all of those things in such a tremendous way. Having made that choice to leave the career that was positive and stable and do all of these things, and know that on some level, I kind of want my way out of this, but I’m not willing to do it directly and instantly. Did you also bear the weight of knowing that your soulmate on some level would’ve really not approved? He would’ve been hurting for you if he’d have known?
Debbie Cassidy (00:58:23): He would’ve been pissed at me, quite frankly, because he was a good guy. I mean, did he drink? Of course. Did he do a little coke once in a while? Yes. But that was once every six months or something.
Adam Williams (00:58:38): At a time when a lot of people were.
Debbie Cassidy (00:58:39): At a time when a lot of people were, correct. He would have been probably disappointed, worried for me.
Adam Williams (00:58:49): It’s just not what he would’ve wanted for you after he was gone. If somebody says to me, “Adam, you’re going to be gone in a week, what would you like the life to be for your wife and sons?” I’m not going to picture that.
Debbie Cassidy (00:59:04): Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That’s so true. I think once I stopped using, when I had that epiphany, I did not go right back to nursing. I actually got a job in a bank as a bank teller, because I wasn’t ready. But I also, I had to go to work again. I didn’t have anybody supporting me anymore. And this person kept coming and trying to give me coke to pull me back in.
And I’ll never forget, this was back in the days, and this was in Denver by this time when we had security guards. They were off-duty police officers that were as security guards in the bank. And I’ll never forget, this person walked up to me one time and he was going to do a banking exchange, and he pushed this coke over to me with his hand, and I had told him over and over again, “no, I’m done. We’re done. Forget it.”
(01:00:07): And I just remember looking at him and I picked up that vial of cocaine and I tossed it over his head and it landed on the floor behind him, and he’s looking at me and I said, “You should probably turn around and pick that up and head out the door before I go talk to that police officer over there.”
And he did, and he didn’t come back after that. I think that was the moment that he knew I was serious, that I was no longer under that control anymore. I do have one thing though, several months later, probably a year later, I heard from him. He wanted to meet. He said he had something that he needed to talk to me about, and here I am again, trusting. I thought, “Oh, he’s seen the light. He wants to apologize,” whatever. And he proceeded to present me a bill for all of the cocaine that I had done.
(01:01:01): He was in trouble with his dealer, his supplier at that time. And I looked at him and I was like, “Wow. I was born at night, but not last night.” I said, “If you would like to take this down to the local police station and file an official complaint, you’re welcome to, but no, I’m not paying you.”
Adam Williams (01:01:21): That’s incredible. How much did he decide the bill should be?
Debbie Cassidy (01:01:25): Oh, it was for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don’t remember exactly, but it was a lot.
Adam Williams (01:01:33): When you started that story and saying he pushed this across the counter to you, my mind went in one direction that said, you probably didn’t want your colleagues to know this piece of your story, this history. You were trying to move forward in a positive way, and he just brought it to the middle of this new clean environment for you. But instead, your gesture was, I’m going to throw this out on the floor, and this is going to be something that people around me might see, probably will see.
This interaction is not going to come off as a positive whether people knew what it was or not. So you really at that point, what I’m getting at is I thought you might’ve felt pressure to keep it a secret, hush-hush whisper with this guy. Don’t let anybody here or see what’s going on. Instead, you’re like, “I’ll face you right in front of these people.” So that strikes me as courageous, bold something.
Debbie Cassidy (01:02:31): Well, I thank you. I didn’t think of it that way. I knew that I was in protection mode. I knew that I was answering the call to change it, and that’s what I had to do to protect myself.
Adam Williams (01:02:43): Yeah, doing what you had to do in the moment.
Debbie Cassidy (01:02:45): It didn’t occur to me what my colleagues might or might not see or think it was. That wasn’t even a thought at that time. That was just my protection.
Adam Williams (01:02:55): Strength.
Debbie Cassidy (01:02:56): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:02:57): Doing what you had to in the moment.
Debbie Cassidy (01:02:57): Correct.
Adam Williams (01:03:00): I mean, you could have gone and gotten a job at a different bank if you had to. Yeah. It didn’t matter. You did what you had to do.
Debbie Cassidy (01:03:04): Correct.
Adam Williams (01:03:06): Are you familiar with Joseph Campbell and The Hero’s Journey?
Debbie Cassidy (01:03:12): 100%. I teach that.
Adam Williams (01:03:12): Okay, yeah. This is that, right?
Debbie Cassidy (01:03:14): 100%.
Adam Williams (01:03:16): You are the hero, the heroine who has overcome so many of these obstacles on this trajectory, rising to this lighter place that we now can be in the conversation.
Debbie Cassidy (01:03:28): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:03:30): Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for all that you’ve shared to this point, did you ever go back to nursing, by the way?
Debbie Cassidy (01:03:36): I did. I did. I went back. I got my master’s degree and I became a first assistant in surgery, which is a specialized degree that you get. I had always known I wanted to be a surgeon from a very young girl, but I never went to med school because I wasn’t good enough. I was a woman. I wasn’t smart enough. I couldn’t make it through med school, just wasn’t done. So I became the next best thing, and that was working in surgery as a nurse.
And then when I got my training to be a first assistant, which means that you stand across from the surgeon and you’re helping them with the surgery. I learned a suture. I would open people, close people, help with the surgery and do all of that. So that was my way of fulfilling my dream of being a surgeon, and I was very successful. I had my own business at it. I was a director of surgery for a few facilities also. So I went back and had a very successful career in nursing.
Adam Williams (01:04:45): I’m picturing you, as you’re saying, open people, close people. I have known forever that is not my career path. I could not have done that. It doesn’t work for me. But obviously we need people like you who are very capable, have the stomach, have the knowledge, the skills, so I think that’s such a remarkable, I’m using that word a lot here, but it’s a rebound. Right? Again, the hero’s journey, you overcame this arc of your story. So much you’ve overcome from birth, pretty much, with your sister from the stories of generational trauma, and you go on with this career. And that brings to mind for me, the wounded healer archetype.
(01:05:30): Because despite all of the things that were traumatic in the ways that you and your body responded to it, at times, you’ve been somebody of service and you’ve been that person who found a way to empathy rather than bitterness, which you could have also had. “Why did I lose my husband? I loved him. Why did I…” All the things, right? “Why was my sister this and that,” all the stuff. And my question there, I guess, is I wonder if you have given thought to what the difference might be for people who break cycles of certain behaviors, who may be find the empathy from traumatic experiences that they went through rather than that bitterness or anger or hatred that they might pass on to others?
Debbie Cassidy (01:06:18): Wow, that’s an awesome question. I don’t know that I have the answer except to say sometimes it’s just what comes in your path and what you listen to. I think all of us get these messages that nudge us along the way, but if we’re not quiet enough within ourselves to hear those messages, then we can take different paths, like you said, one toward bitterness and going that way. Not to say that I didn’t hold some of that, obviously, and make some very bad decisions along the way. But I think it’s also when I picked up that first book by Deepak, I think that was the beginning of the trajectory change for me in my life.
Adam Williams (01:07:11): I read one of his books, The Seven Spiritual Laws, many years ago, and I don’t have anything to cite from it. I can’t recall it, and I don’t know if you have any bits of wisdom from that that especially stood out to you, but I do remember reading it.
Debbie Cassidy (01:07:25): I think it’s called The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, but it’s really… I don’t like the word law as much as like principle, but it really is a way to live your life and it’s a way to look at giving, receiving, how to put your desires out there, how to let go the detachment that we have to detach from things in order for things to come into our life. What is our dharma or purpose here in life?
You have what you do. Nursing was one of mine. Now as a guide and facilitator, helping people go through things, like I have gone through the training that I have gone through, understanding the living team beliefs, that book all has that in there. It’s such a tiny book with so much wisdom in it, and then of course he’s gone on to write, what, 120 more books since then.
Adam Williams (01:08:25): I’m behind. I didn’t know it was that many.
Debbie Cassidy (01:08:28): Oh yeah, he’s quite prolific in his writing and being able to get to know him and train with him was one of the greatest joys of my life, and very grateful for that time.
Adam Williams (01:08:44): I think people’s life experiences that they bring into something like this, that you now do and sharing and teaching again, again, that empathy that is really rooted in very real and human experiences is so powerful to me. I think of religion and spirituality, but religion, a lot of times the dogmatic organized form of it is passed down generation to generation.
And you either just buy in and you don’t necessarily reconsider it, or you do reconsider at some point and choose your own path, go some other direction. I feel like what you bring to this through the spirituality, because of your experiences is so much deeper and richer, is what I’m getting at. It’s not just a matter of not thinking about it and “Oh, this is what I do and who I am.” There’s an authenticity. This is the word I’m trying to get to. I find faith in people like you who have found their spiritual place or their faith-based place because of the experiences that they’ve gone through and they’ve risen from.
Debbie Cassidy (01:09:48): Thank you for that, Adam. It has been a journey, and I do think one of the things that I bring to the table is through some of the things that I teach now, the health and wellness that I teach now through Ayurveda and meditation, yoga, all of these other modalities. The hero’s journey is that I also have this whole medical background and I can really weave those together.
So I can separate maybe the energetic stuff from the real body medical stuff, and I can go, “Wow, I wouldn’t worry about that. Don’t take that prescription. We can do it in lifestyle changes,” or, “Wow, maybe you should go have that little lump checked out.” I bring both to the table to integrate into what I do now. And I think that’s something that a lot of the people that go this way does not have, and I’m grateful for that.
Adam Williams (01:10:45): Thank you for pointing that out. I mean more clearly connecting those dots because we have, I think what could be described as kind of the conventional wisdom on medicine, on healthcare where you’ve been an RN, and the other side, which some people might describe as woo-woo or whatever. And it’s more abstract perhaps to them, whereas science of being a nurse maybe carries a different weight for them.
So for you to have that intersection is incredible and well, again, credibility, right? I say you have authenticity because of your experiences, because that’s the heart and compassion and empathy that you bring to this, and you have the scientific background. And also over here, this other, I don’t know how you would describe it, but these other modalities you’re describing like Ayurvedic medicine and things like that. It’s such a fertile overlap there, a Venn diagram of these things. You’re special.
Debbie Cassidy (01:11:41): Oh, well, I don’t think so, but thank you.
Adam Williams (01:11:42): Well, yeah, I mean…
Debbie Cassidy (01:11:44): It’s been an interesting life and a good journey, a somewhat hard journey at times, but it’s been… I can’t imagine not living this life.
Adam Williams (01:11:54): Resilience is a recurring theme I feel like in conversations that we have here, and that’s something that you know about for sure. I wonder if we all have it and maybe some of us, we don’t necessarily know it until we’re forced to step up to the plate and face the challenge that is previously unconscionable as you’ve had to do too many times maybe.
Debbie Cassidy (01:12:17): Oh, I think we all have it. I just think sometimes we’re protected and we don’t find it until that happens. I mean, think about if you go for a hike and you get lost in the woods and you have to spend two or three nights in the woods alone. You are going to find it then and you’re going to think with all the noises out there, how frightening that is, but something comes out and pulls you together, that resilience, that courage to get you through that night until the next day. It’s the same thing.
Adam Williams (01:12:49): Things that we wouldn’t necessarily have thought we were capable of or never even just gave thought to it at all.
Debbie Cassidy (01:12:53): Absolutely.
Adam Williams (01:12:54): Until you’re put in that position. So yoga is part of your spiritual practices and background and teaching and things. It has been for me as well. There’s a teaching, an idea that comes to my mind of how fire burns away all the impurities. We do these practices and we can stir up heat with this as a means of burning away all that is impure and in the way, and then what is left among the ashes is what is the essential, what is pure and what is real.
Debbie Cassidy (01:13:26): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:13:27): And it seems like after all of the fires you’ve had to go through, that where you are now in your life with this teaching, with being there serving other people is what’s pure and real for you. Is this what you were meant to be in your life, do you think?
Debbie Cassidy (01:13:44): It is. In Sanskrit, it’s called Dharma. It’s our purpose in life. It’s where we ask “How may I help, how may I serve?” And I think I have served a lot in my life in very many different ways. I am especially proud in serving this way because it really helps people find that onion that the layers need to be pulled away from, which is just like my family’s history keeps getting swept under the rug and you don’t deal with it. And we don’t know how that affects the other generations.
We don’t know how that’s affecting our children. Simple little words that you can say that you wish you could pull back, but when you start really pulling the layers away and getting to the heart of the matter, that’s the Dharma. That’s the purpose of my life, is to help people do that. One of the best ways to do that is, as you know, in silence, meditation, get quiet. Silent retreats are some of the best things that’s ever happened to me, is being in silence for seven days. No technology, no phone, no TV. You’re in silence.
Adam Williams (01:15:01): And you lead those from time to time yourself, now.
Debbie Cassidy (01:15:03): I do, yes.
Adam Williams (01:15:06): Well, as I do with every guest on the podcast, I’ll have your website and things in the show notes on the website at wearechaffeepod.com. So that information will be there and for people to be able to find you.
Debbie Cassidy (01:15:17): Oh, great.
Adam Williams (01:15:17): Because we all could use some help with healing, I think.
Debbie Cassidy (01:15:21): Yes. Whether we know it or not.
Adam Williams (01:15:23): Absolutely, yeah. I think an awful lot of us don’t know that, and I don’t know what, or if you have thoughts on this, I don’t know what it takes or what the difference is person to person about finding that moment. What is it that clicks and opens that door and shines the light, and is the voice in the woods on a cross-country ski that says… first of all indicates, “I’m here,” right? There is something here with you. There’s something behind you supporting you and you can make a positive change. Finding that awareness that we need healing, is the first step, right?
Debbie Cassidy (01:15:52): It is the first step. We all have our own story. My story is my story, yours is your. We all have that story, that history that we may or may not know about, and it’s having that courage to step into it and finally deal with it.
Adam Williams (01:16:12): Thank you so much, Debbie.
Debbie Cassidy (01:16:12): Thank you, Adam, I appreciate it.
Adam Williams (01:16:14): For sharing all of this, for being so open and vulnerable.
Debbie Cassidy (01:16:16): Thank you. I appreciate it.
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Adam Williams (01:16:31): Thanks for listening to, We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast. I hope that our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you. And if so, you can learn more in this episode show notes at wearechaffeepod.com. If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me directly at Adam@wearechaffeepod.com.
I also invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcast or Spotify, or whatever platform you use that has that functionality. I also welcome your telling others about the Looking Upstream podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation.
(01:17:08): Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer, and photographer. Jon Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to KHEN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado, and to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment, and to Lisa Martin community advocacy coordinator for the We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative.
The Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with the Chaffee County Department of Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and it’s supported by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Office of Health Equity.
You can learn more about the Looking Upstream podcast at wearechaffeepod.com and on Instagram @wearechaffeepod. You also can learn more about the overall We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative at wearechaffee.org Till the next episode, as we say at We Are Chaffee, “share stories, make change.”
[Outro music, horns and guitar instrumental]
